How Homicide Life On The Street Helped Make Me The Critic I Am: Prelude to The Rewatch

 

If you have been reading my column for the last few years and if you have been reading my blog for longer, you know that I am an unabashed fan of Homicide: Life on The Street, the groundbreaking police drama that aired from 1993 to 1999 on NBC.

My tastes have changed and grown immensely in the nearly thirty years I’ve been watching TV with an adult lens and even more in the near decade I’ve been writing for this site. But one thing hasn’t in all that time: I still feel that Homicide is one of the greatest shows of all time. If I had to live the rest of my life on a desert island and there were only five shows I could watch for that period, one of them would be Homicide. The rest of the shows have changed in the last twenty years – hell in the last five – but Homicide has never left that lofty post.

There are many reasons for that, that transcend the usual ones that so many critics far greater than myself spent so much time since the show was first on the air and have put into words ever since. So before I begin on what will be an epic task, I want to tell you some of the personal reasons I feel this way, some of which have occurred to me fairly recently, others that have always been there.

As some of you who are long time readers are aware when I was an adolescent moving into my teenage years, there were a handful of adult dramas in the 1990s that helped me make the move from television viewer to admirer and critic of the medium. Homicide wasn’t the first of the series but it was by far the most important milestone along the path because it was the first series in my long career of viewing that I was an unabashed fanboy of.

My parents know this better than anyone: this may have been the least annoying aspect of my childhood for them but it must have had them wonder about my sanity more than once. My mother, for one, would often note how many times he had to throw away pieces of paper, large, small and every size in between, that had recreations of ‘the board’ on them. Anyone who is a fan of the show knows that the board was as much a character on Homicide as the detectives, the box and Baltimore.

I spent a lot of time in my college years and probably well-past it replicating the board by year. In those days prior to streaming and even DVD players, this meant that I had to record almost every episode of the show (not a burden by any means), watching the entire episode for when the director or cinematographer chose to pan over it or down it (this happened at least once an episode, sometimes several times) and then trying to rewind and rewind until you captured every single name that was on the board at the time. And if you’re a fan of the show, you know that all of these names were not only written by hand, but the pans could be at most five to ten seconds long before they scrolled down to the murder that was at the center of the investigation in question.

I don’t know if it would make my parents feel better or cause them to question the collective sanity of the fans if they knew that in fact there were actually websites on the internet which not only showed the entire board for each season, broken down by calendar year. Because I only found out about them years after the fact and because the internet itself was far more primitive than it would be even a few years later, I don’t know how detailed it was. Given how just a few years later the world would begin to obsess over the various Easter eggs in Lost to a greater degree (I was one of those fans, so I know what they were like) I suspect had Homicide aired a few years later there would have been vast debates online as to which detective was doing worse on the series when it came to clearance rates as well as wondering what the names on the board were about. (There very well may have been at the time; as I’ve mentioned I didn’t discover the internet until 2000.)

Homicide was a landmark series for me in many ways and taught me many things. One of the subtler ones may have been the common ground between the critic and the fan.

This has never been entirely clear even before the internet and it may be impossible to distinguish now. The larger problem is that both groups are, in many ways, so completely divided that the idea of them finding common ground may seem laughable. And as someone who has been both and written about the flaws of each group, I can see why.

First of all, let’s not engage in any fables about how the Internet or social media has destroyed fandom as if it were some beautiful and precious thing. The word is derived from fanatic after all, which means that one is not only a great defender of the work in question – whether it be a sports team, a movie  or a television show – but is virulently opposed to any form of even mild criticism to it. I will acknowledge that in the last decade is has gotten poisonous as well as ludicrous because of social media and the internet. However, like everything else, the internet didn’t cause this particular disorder. It just amplified it exponentially. And while I do admit it has taken on the air of lunacy, there is a part of me that always has trouble passing judgment too harshly. Is it insane that so many people were infuriated by The Acolyte that they claimed it destroyed Star Wars? Yes. But as someone who was so infuriated by the fact that The X-Files decided to keep going after David Duchovny left that I spent more than fifteen years before I was willing to watch the final season of the original run…well, I’m not sure whether I can throw stones at this particular house.

And as someone who has written an entire series for this site about the foolishness of critics over the last three years and will no doubt add more to it, I can understand why many people would consider a critic someone who has a high opinion of themselves – and literally nothing else. Honestly having seen some of the people who were calling themselves critics in the 1970s and 1980s, I’m beginning to wonder if they were just trolls before the internet was invented. How else could one describe the writings of John Simon, Clive Barnes, Vincent Canby and much of the nonfiction work of Harlan Ellison? Indeed there are a few people claiming to be critics today who are, for all intents and purposes, trolls with a fancy vocabulary.

But oddly enough, after reading so many of the critical columns on this very site I have realized that the best critics are fans, albeit a different sort than the ones who attend Comic-Con. We might argue whether Chaplin could beat Keaton in a laugh-off, we might prefer the films of Scorsese and Tarantino to the MCU (although let’s not deny there is some crossover), we might prefer binge-watching The Good Place to Torchwood but we love our artform as much as the pop culture fans love theirs.

Maybe that’s the reason so many critics, myself included, marveled about the era of Peak Tv over the last quarter of a century. It seemed to be a perfect storm where the critics, the providers and the people were all in sync about what made great art. It wasn’t true, of course, but there are worse lies to believe and having spent so much time watching television in the last twenty years, it was a lot closer to the truth then most of them.

What does this have to do with Homicide? It goes back to being a TV critic in the 21^st century. When there were only three channels and then four, it was a lot harder for any show you loved to survive. Fans and critics often did find common ground more often then they used to when it came to TV shows that were gone too soon.  For those of you who still can’t believe that My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks and Firefly were canceled after one season, we critics missed them first and take a certain amount of pride in those of you who continue to vindicate us years and decades after the fact.

TV GUIDE, then far bigger in the public discourse then it is today, for a long time had an annual feature called  ‘The Best Show You’re Not Watching’.   There were often campaigns to save shows that pre-dated some of the ones that came later – the fan-campaigns to save Veronica Mars and Jericho were the most prominent examples. (There were, for the record, quite a few critics on each bandwagon.) And often to save a show for one season only meant it would be canceled the next. In 1999, there was a campaign to save Sports Night, it was renewed – and it was cancelled the following year for reasons unknown. (I’m still bitter about that by the way.) In my memory there were only two series that TV Guide campaigned for that got to live to a natural conclusion: Homicide and Party of Five.

If fans spent much of their time then (as they do now) on genre series, critics tried a lot harder to save series that were more ‘mainstream’ for lack of a better word.  Over the years we tried to save such series as Pushing Daisies and Hannibal to recent series like Winning Time. The fragmenting of the audiences in the last twenty years might have been bad for the business of television but it was good for creativity: a lot of shows on network and cable that would have been cancelled even ten years ago got to live long lives because of it. Such was not the case in the 1990s when if you average 10 million viewers a week (as Homicide did in its final seasons you were considered a failure by the standards of NBC. The fact that it survived as long as it did had nothing to do with its loyal fanbase but rather the fact that NBC was in the middle of its ‘Must-See TV’ era with Seinfeld, Frasier, ER, Mad About You and Law & Order all drawing 20 to 30 million viewers a week. Homicide was allowed to survive through a series of precarious circumstances that had fans like me nervous every time we got to May – and that same uncertainty was responsible for so many cast changes over the years.

All of this helped prepare me in a way to be a TV critic in a way I’m not sure I could have been had my initial exposure to great television been, say, Buffy The Vampire Slayer or ER. If you don’t know if a show you’re that devoted to is going to survive from year to year, you get to appreciate it more the longer it lasts. You get to understand the things that make it great and be amazed at how great the work was considering the conditions it was put together under. People expecting huge things from Homicide when it was first made – it aired its pilot after the Super Bowl – and when it didn’t become the huge hit NBC was hoping for, it would have been very easy for its writers to conform with the standards of television during the era. Indeed after its first two seasons it began to make subtle accommodations to adjust.

But throughout its entire run Homicide was true to itself in a way I honestly don’t think any other network show ever was and that we wouldn’t see until HBO and other cable networks began to completely reinvent it. Part of the metric of network television, as true today as it was thirty years ago, was that you got the same thing every week when it came to characters or to stories. Homicide went out of its week to constantly reinvent itself within the formula of the cop show in a way so utterly different before – and honestly, since. You knew there would be some constants but you also knew at the end of the day, this was not a cop show in the way we were used to on Law & Order or NYPD Blue or as we’d see on The Shield or even The Wire.

These weren’t corrupt cops or heroes, which are the extremes we got over the years before. These were not antiheroes or people who were stuck in a broken system. These were men and women for whom the most horrible act in the average live – a death of violence  - was something that they had to shrug off at the end of the day and while they were working. And it helped matters immensely that the series was set in Baltimore which while it didn’t look nearly as decrepit as it would on The Wire a decade later, still looked ugly and brutal.

And you got little release from it the way we have other cops shows since then. There was almost no violence, no chases, no beatings. So much of the action took place in a dirty squad-room with walls where the paint was peeling, where the detectives had to type out their reports and use liquid paper to correct them, where so much of the drama took place in a room where you could almost smell the urine on the walls even if no one talked about it. There were no mysteries, no brilliant killers, no masterminds. Indeed the most astonishing thing about Homicide, one of the things that drew me to it and has never been truly tried since, is how little mystery there is about the murder and how ordinary most of the killers are.

The thesis statement of Homicide as I’ve mentioned before was ‘Crime makes you stupid” and while there were many exceptions to it over the series run, that was one of the great fundamental truths. The vast majority of the murders were committed for dumb reasons by dumb people. Indeed one of the biggest flaws of procedurals, including those of Law & Order as well as serial killer shows and the CSI series, is that it went out of its way to show that the killers were clever people who were capable of lying to detectives faces and who the evidence had to trap them.

The killers on Homicide, for the most part, weren’t geniuses or even that intelligent. Neither, by and large, were the detectives – you won’t find a Bobby Goren or Gil Grissom here. What they were good at was understanding human nature in a way that most of us aren’t – the darkest parts of it. And they didn’t care, by and large, why the killers what they did. They just wanted to know who, what and how – the why was irrelevant and most of them knew they were better off not knowing it. Shows like True Detective and their ilk want to figure out why people were killed. Detectives like Frank Pembleton knew that the reasons were irrelevant. It’s not like a murder ever makes sense.

I’ve spent my entire life, in a sense, looking for another drama like Homicide to come along and its telling that even the men and women who were behind it  -such geniuses as Tom Fontana, David Simon and Anya Epstein – have each created series that are masterpiece since then but never a show close to it. That speaks to what a masterpiece it is. There are countless shows that have tried to be Law & Order or The X-Files or 24 or Breaking Bad but no one’s tried to do a show like Homicide.

And for more than twenty years it has been gone from the national consciousness. It was one of the first major dramas to be released on DVD but after being syndicated on networks like Court TV and other now defunct cable channels, it vanished without a trace from TV. All of its contemporaries can be found on every streaming service but Homicide was never there for a generation.

Until now. Earlier this year Peacock, NBC’s streaming service finally procured the rights to broadcast all 123 episodes of Homicide: Life on The Street. I have rewatched the show in its entirety twice since it left syndication and written about it for my blog both times, once during 2003-2005, again between 2016-2018. But in both cases I kept my writings mostly to myself and haven’t included them on this column because if my readers couldn’t find the series I loved so much, what was the point? I’ve given hints about it over the years about how magnificent it was but mere descriptions can’t do a show like Homicide justice. It has to be seen – and experienced – for itself. And now you can.

I have been wanting to rewatch the series for a while anyway – like all great works of art, I didn’t really need a reason. But the fact that several of my fellow critics on this site have picked up the gauntlet in a series of impressive episode reviews for their own columns over the past year has made me realize the time has come. People have been breaking down such recent masterpieces as Severance, The Last of Us and Fallout and I’ve done versions of this myself over the years with other classics. Most recently I did so for the final six episodes of Better Call Saul and every so often I do so with other masterclasses of episodes, usually season or series finales.

But this will be my most ambitious project to date. (For medium, mind you. I’ve done episode guides before for other series for my personal blog.) I would not force this labor of love upon my readers if Homicide was not at last available for streaming. I’m not saying you should necessarily get Peacock only to watch Homicide but if you’ve already got it, say because you’re a fan of Poker Face or you wanted to see what the fuss about Mrs. Davis was, you could do worse than watching this show. That said, I will tell you in advance Homicide doesn’t binge particularly well. Not because it doesn’t have serialized stories or multi-part episodes but because the tone does not lend itself to watching multiple episodes after each other the same way even such bleak shows as The Sopranos or Breaking Bad would.

 This is not a show with a lot of twists and turns or cliffhangers; it avoids them like the plague most of the time. Character pieces which Homicide is are more rewarding when you experience them at a measured pace. Maybe do one episode a day if you want to push it. I’m going to do it once a week precisely because I don’t want to rush through it. As Roger Ebert said you want this show to last the same way you do ice cream – because its good. And Homicide is all 31 flavors put together.

I close this prelude by saying that, as you’d expect, there will be spoilers in these reviews. Or will there? As I’ve mentioned in my blogs before Homicide isn’t a whodunit or a why-dun-it as we’ve seen other procedurals like The Sinner do. Homicide is about murder and violence but only the way that The Wire was about the drug war. A decade later Lester Freamon would tell us ‘all the pieces matter’ and while that was true there on Homicide the pieces matter not because they are part of a whole but because every piece has its own value. This may sound confusing. In Homicide, it’s simple. Murder always is, sadly.